


Background Noise

by dictatorships, orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:50:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dictatorships/pseuds/dictatorships, https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cultivation extras - background stories of various characters and other nonsense that doesn't fit into the main timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. beneath (sollux and aradia)

**Author's Note:**

> confession time: i kinda like this first one better than anything i've written for the actual story so far.
> 
> oops.

Your name is Aradia Megido, and your best friend is about to get himself killed.

You are experiencing conflicting feelings of worry and exasperation. Only just this morning, you had grabbed his arm and looked him dead in the eyes, saying, "Please don't do anything stupid." It was such a simple request. You had an inkling he wouldn't listen to you, and your inkling was correct.

Sollux Captor is about to do something very stupid.

You don't know what to do with him when he lets his fickle emotions cloud his judgment, which is most of the time. He is the smartest person you've ever met, and yet here he stands. He stands with his arms stiff at his sides, waiting. _The mood will pass_ , you want to tell him. _The anger will pass, it always does, and you'll be back to laughing at his challenges and his threats. Please, don’t do something you can't undo_. But you can't get to him, everyone is watching, and you're at the back of the crowd.

You're standing on your tiptoes to see, and the crowd inhales in unison. Eridan looks so pleased with himself, and he walks closer and closer to Sollux. Nobody breathes, Sollux lunges, he is caught mid-step before his fist reaches his target, and everybody laughs.

You feel more like crying.

-

You find him with Feferi's help. She feels so guilty, she says, it's all her fault, she says, although it's not. It's his fault; you won't deny that, as much as you love him. He knows better. But Feferi feels terrible, since this had something to do with her on some level, and you barely know her but she takes you to him for his sake.

The guards let her in and she drags you in with her. Sollux is sitting on the floor in this dimly lit room, his hands tied, and he doesn't look angry or sad or anything. The mood has passed, apparently.

"They're gonna kick me out. Exile me." _Eckthile,_ he says. It was probably funny once, his lisp, but at the moment you feel like nothing has ever been funny and you have never been happy because this is way more serious than his poker face would suggest. Feferi runs over to him, hugs him, kisses him on the cheeks and the forehead and snuggles her face into his hair.

"I have some city money," she says, and she pulls out a wad of bills and pushes it into his pocket. "It's not a whole lot but it should get you a place to stay for a little while." She lists names – she emphasizes the name of the Council's envoy to the settlement who lives close to the border. "He might be able to help," she says, her voice breaking as she tries to sound cheerful, and she finally stops moving and talking long enough to start crying.

It's kind of heart-wrenching. Sollux looks down and mumbles his gratitude. Feferi kisses him again, a proper kiss this time, and when she pulls away he just looks sad, his face shining from her tears. She half-smiles at you, wiping her cheeks. "I'll leave you two alone," she says, and she does.

"You'll leave in the morning, I guess." You kneel down to his level, lift his head up gently until he meets your gaze.

"Yeah," he says.

You make sure you don't even blink when you tell him, "I'm going with you." You leave before he can protest.

Your home is small, and you don't have much in the way of belongings, so you can pack most of it. You pack all of your artifacts – old things you've found floating in the river, buried in the soil, resting in plain sight. Things from before the Leveling. Things you can probably make money off of, if you can find someone who knows what they're worth. You take anything you could feasibly sell. You can sell some of your clothes if you have to, although you'll need to wash them first – not that you don't wash them, but you've never tried too hard to get the mud out because you've always been back in the mud within the day.

In the City, you think, there is no mud. Why would there be? There is concrete and metal, but there is no mud, no dirt, nothing to dig into. In the City, the earth doesn't go on for miles underneath you, it stops right below your feet.

You shudder at the thought. When you were a child and your friends had been preoccupied with flying, you had laughed at them. Why do we need to fly to escape, you thought, when digging is so much easier? There's a whole world beneath you, a world of bugs and roots and things long forgotten.

The thought of losing that world almost makes you reconsider leaving, but you shake your head and steel yourself. You have to do this for Sollux.

The two of you are gone before the sun is completely up. Your bags are heavy, and you're glad the city isn't far. Sollux keeps glancing wistfully over his shoulder, but you just stare at the ground, studying the indentations your feet make in the grass, focusing on the way it feels to walk on real earth so you'll never forget. 


	2. armor (terezi)

You are glad you are blind because you don't have to see how they look at you.

It's not like you don't feel the atmosphere change when you walk into a classroom. The airflow shifts from so many heads turning to face you, to watch you walk to your seat, and to steal glances at you during lecture. Anyway, you can see them move, soft, fuzzy blocks of color. Most of the time, it doesn't bother you, but you are still glad you can't see their faces.

You deserve to be here just as much as they do. You are a citizen of the City and your tuition is paid and you have not made lower than an A since you started attending this school. It is definitely illegal to discriminate against a citizen based on their mutant skin color, and you are at a law school, so they know better than to refuse you entry into classes or give you a lower grade than you've earned.

It wasn't so bad when you were younger.

You were blinded in the greyskins' settlement, and being an orphan, now with a disability as a bonus, you had to run. You ran in the night in the middle of a storm. And she found you, cold and soaked to the bone, frail, malnourished, ten years old. She took you and she made you a citizen and she dared everyone to look at you funny. She made you go to school, and in her home you learned how to see without seeing.

Back then, Jack Noir didn't have the Council by the balls and the whole city under his crooked thumb. Everyone knew you were an outsider, but you were looked upon mostly with curiosity instead of pity and disgust and fear.

Sometime between then and now, Noir was elected, and he changed everything. You became a second-class citizen, you became a freak, a savage, something to be feared and loathed. All because Noir got it into his head that every piece of land he could reach belonged to the City – belonged to him.

This is something you should have expected. This is not something you were prepared for when you were younger – you had friends, you had friends that didn't care if you were blind or grey or short or skinny or anything, and they got infected with the phobia and hatred of "your people" that Jack Noir spread like a plague.

You got over it. You grew thick skin, you grew steel armor and diamond-hard dragon scales. They thought you were less than human, so you threw out all you'd learned about etiquette and the myriad ways proper people interact. You became the spastic, cackling caricature of the savage lurking in the darkest corners of their minds.

Sometimes, people are afraid of you. Mostly you just make them kind of uncomfortable.

They call you psycho and you take it as a compliment. They avoid you and you don't even care.

Still, you wonder if it would be harder if you could see them.


End file.
